Storing Large Amounts of Data with Offline Storage apps

Richard Rabins

Mobile apps that work in offline mode is highly desirable for business apps. The List control in Alpha Anywhere includes built-in tools to cache offline data. For web apps, offline data is cached in local storage. Local storage, unfortunately, is limited in size (usually 5MB), which makes it difficult to store large amounts of data in offline apps.

For PhoneGap applications, however, data can be stored on the mobile device's file system in addition to local storage. This allows you to create offline capable apps that can store a large amount of data when disconnected. In the video tutorial below, we demonstrate how to take advantage of the file system to store data offline in PhoneGap applications.

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Further reading:

offline applications

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About Author

Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.